🌿ELO System Updates

[h_illes]

Thank you for demonstrating that you are listening to our feedback. Though you waited several months and several of our concerns were not even addressed, you at least did the minimum. Although I have a hard time understanding the admin point of view on these matters, your response is respectful and greatly appreciated.

You are more lenient than most others here. Completely ignoring hundreds of relevant comments for months is well short of doing the minimum.

[Zozoken]

Thank you for demonstrating that you are listening to our feedback. Though you waited several months and several of our concerns were not even addressed, you at least did the minimum. Although I have a hard time understanding the admin point of view on these matters, your response is respectful and greatly appreciated.

You are more lenient than most others here. Completely ignoring hundreds of relevant comments for months is well short of doing the minimum.

Better than no response at all, which was my expectation. I'd rather be agreeable (but firm) than to give BGA staff an excuse to cease communication again.

[menettm]

For me, this is not very forgivable for having made us wait since December 13, so 5 months, to correct these bad implementations when there was a lot of feedback that explained why it was bad.

[h_illes]

We value your input and are committed to ensuring a fair and balanced ranking system for all players.

If you meant this, I compel you to respond, because right now, the ranking system is everything but fair and balanced.

[sfoozy]

I can't say I read all... [checks notes...] *87* pages worth of user comments in this thread, but I've read enough to get the gist...

To keep this short, a few simple questions to @lordalx / admins: The majority of users who posted seem to vehemently disapprove of many of the new ELO changes introduced here. And they've cited seemingly legitimate reasons for why these changes are not improving their experience of this product...

1) Is the perceived "problem" really an issue that affects the enjoyment of this site for most users?
2) Who was really asking for these changes in the first place?
3) Why is this change worth upsetting a majority of your users (ignoring apathetic users)? If there are a few users who abuse the system, why punish all other users who play games in good faith / non-ELO-abusing manners?

Lastly, if a user wants to commit their time to churning/abusing ELO, maybe their life is sad and depressing and that is the only thing that brings them joy? It's not worth ruining other users experience here just because of a few bad actors.

TO SUMMARIZE: This change is wildly unpopular. This change isn't really needed for this site to function properly... maybe just undo the change until you come up with a better / more precise solution targeting only those that clearly are abusing your ELO system?

But at the end of the day, yes, it's just ELO and I'm going to keep playing games here for fun. Just some head-scratching decisions made by admins, so I felt like posting!

[MANNY-OLIVIA]

→ Red Thumbs for competitive play
One last thing that is going to be changed in a few weeks will be the impact of the Red Thumbs.
You can currently give a Red Thumb to any player with which you had a bad game experience. This prevents you from competing against them in ranked games or the Arena, but not in Tournaments.
This system can, and unfortunately is, used to prevent some players from competing against the best players. Considering that the Red Thumb system is being abused this way, on purpose or not, we will update the way Red Thumbs are impacting the matchmaking for the next season.

Why wasn't this implemented?

[mosed1]

Regarding ELO Decay
For me a much better solution would be to hide strong players which don't play for a long time in the ranking list.
In this way the can keep they're ELO even without playing for a while. And active players don't have to overcome an inactive Player with an very high ELO.
Lichess and other Chess Platforms use this mechanism.

[yzemaze]

For me a much better solution would be to hide strong players which don't play for a long time in the ranking list.

BGA does this already. (Check out Color Pop’s Elo ranking and my rating e. g.) I think the cut-off is 3 months of inactivity.

[RazorOz]

It also doesn't solve anything. Because it's not hard to play 1 game in 3 months. Like when you consider there's a quote above how they want a fair and balanced ranking system for all players, the current system quite clearly isn't fair for all players, it massively favours player who don't actually play. Your best way to maintain a high ranking once you have one is play a few games a month. The system heavily punishes all volume players as they're the ones who get bodied by the ELO decay, and without those players a lot of games would struggle to fire. This leads to a system that isn't balanced at all, the system now gives an inaccurate reflection of rankings because of this, and this will only get worse over time if they don't act (and I find it unbelievable they haven't acted long ago, given this decision seems universally unpopular).

[Ragnarok1er]

Please stop the Elo leak in games like this one :

https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=516971012
https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=516989652

There is no reason these tables should lose ~10 Elo overall, because the game was mistakenly flagged as a « team game ».